It has long been known to equip a motor vehicle with sun visors to shade the eyes of the driver and front seat passenger from the glare of the sun coming through the windshield or window of a motor vehicle. Many motor vehicles include sun visors that are pivotally mounted on individual stalks and manually pivoted on the stalks between a stowed position adjacent the motor vehicle headliner and one or more operating positions covering an upper portion of the windshield or side window. Unfortunately, such sun visors have a limited range of motion and so provide glare protection over only a limited range of visor positions. For example, most sun visor designs provide little or no protection against glare coming through the windshield at or near a centrally mounted rear view mirror.
It is also known to provide extendable sun visors for vehicles, with the intended purpose of allowing greater flexibility for the user in positioning the sun visor to prevent or reduce glare. Prior art designs often are simply a visor panel or blade which the user can manually extend outwardly along a swiveling support arm, or from within a main visor body panel, to translate the panel from a first position to a second, extended position.
While effective for their intended purposes, the above-described prior art sun visors suffer from various deficiencies. Specifically, most sun visor designs focus on reducing glare passing through the side windows and the upper windshield portion directly in front of a vehicle occupant, but neglect to consider glare passing through relatively unblocked portions of the vehicle windshield such as the area surrounding the centrally-mounted rear view mirror. In turn, prior art extendable sun visor designs tend to require relatively complex mechanisms to provide desired functionalities, resulting in an increased manufacturing cost that must be passed on to the consumer. Thus, a need is identified in the art for improvements to prior art sun visor designs.